(5 of 10)
There is the player who passionately needs to show off. The player who does not, but is destroyed by looking bad. The people who must win to be happy, and the people for whom making good shots is what matters. All of them run risks of great humiliation in tennis. Along with cooperative pleasure, hostility, subservience, competitiveness, narcissism are all at play, sometimes in conflict with one another. Inner conflicts occur, however, when subconscious primitive urges (read id) and value systems (read super ego) clash. A player about to realize a "forbidden desire"—from simply winning to smashing a ball at a female opponent—is a player in trouble. There are other divided and ultimately unstrung souls: the man who needs to feel great hostility in order to play hard, but whose conscience tells him that hostility is a bad thing. The woman—these days she is usually over 35—for whom beating her husband or trying to win at all may be a deep and sensitive taboo. Many women admit that they want to win, but feel "I'm being mean" when they do. Gallwey, for example, has watched superior women players breeze into a 5-1 or 5-2 score over their husbands, only to find themselves unable to put the set away by winning the sixth and final game.
The deepest cause of stress when playing with partners is a vulnerable sense of tormented and helpless guilt or responsibility, which destroys tennis strokes and poisons the atmosphere of the game. Profound, personal involvement of any sort off the court -"deep love or hate," or both together—can invade the game and make being tennis partners intolerable. (Playing against someone you love is much easier.) Fathers or mothers partnered with a favorite child are often as tense as husbands and wives. Father and son players know this all too well. A tournament player learned long ago that his game goes to pieces just knowing that his father is in the stands. In the early informal days, the proud father, longing to see his son, would sneak up on the game, skulking from tree to tree at the country club. But the son —mysteriously sensitive to his father's presence—always blew up on the court.
It is no surprise that when they are not berating their partners, hard-pressed tennis players of any gender tend to talk to themselves. The level of discourse is not high. It is also likely to be hortatory and derisive. "Watch the ball, dummy. Watch the ball!" According to Gallwey, such self-abuse is highly destructive. So is what he calls the "Oh-Oh Experience"—as in "Oh-Oh! Here comes a backhand." Gallwey pioneered "yoga tennis" (or Zennis, as some people call it). From his Inner Game Institute above Malibu Beach, Calif., he has urged hundreds of thousands of students, TV viewers and readers to improve their game by shutting up that judgmental and frightened voice. Stop trying so hard, he argues. Let the body and racquet emulate "the unthinking spontaneity of the leopard" and do what comes naturally.